Hello cool people,

Last week, I was on a call with some friends when one of them said: “It looks like the French government is going to fall this week!” They live in the UK. I live in Paris. I very calmly pretended I knew what they were talking about. If I was to give an update on how my quest to repair my relationship to the news is going, that would just about sum it up.

Lately, I’ve been digging into the history of journalism. Each new entry gives me a clue about the elements of factual storytelling I want to keep, and the ones we could get rid of. It’s the great journalism decluttering.

Last month, we dug into the Roman Empire, and I came to the conclusion that there was not much about the Acta Diurna – often touted as the first example of a newspaper in history – that I wanted to keep. Sure, it was a space to publish information about the world at regular intervals. But that’s about it: it wasn’t independent, it wasn’t accountable, and it didn’t serve anyone but the state.

Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about how journalism and community fit together. The tangled webs of interdependence: a reporter may cover a local (Paris), or topical community (science), they may be part of the community they’re covering (a queer person covering queer communities), and the community might play a crucial part in the information gathering process: sending tips, providing experts, giving feedback. But recently, I’ve been circling around the idea that consuming facts should be a collective activity, too. How else are we meant to process the constant torrent of grief and rage being thrown at us?

As the great writer and activist adrienne maree brown said, we humans have the technology to know more about what's happening in the world, but we have not yet built the spiritual technology to be able to handle all that knowing. Our tiny human brains were built to keep track of the hundred or so people who lived around us, and whose existences were deeply, physically, tangibly intertwined with ours. Then globalisation happened, the internet, and boom. Now we have the (technological) tools to see what a child in Slavyansk, Ukraine sees, and we can read about the daily life of the women who make our clothes in a factory in Bangladesh. The problem is, our emotional capacity has not evolved to match this. There’s only so much information, and only so much grief, we can hold at once.

This came into sharp focus last year. In the Paris suburbs, a police officer killed a 17-year-old child called Nahel in the street, in broad daylight. The news alerts went off, and then the videos recorded by neighbors started trickling in. A blurry, seven-second video playing on a loop, a gunshot, a black screen. The outrage, the commentators, the victim-blamers, the “debate”, the news cycle.

Then his mother spoke publicly, so dazed she wasn’t even crying yet, and my world became a blur. Compulsively, I watched every video of her, Mounia, a single parent who in the space of seven seconds had gone from being the annoyed caretaker of a teenage boy, to trying to process the biggest loss of her life in front of the world’s cameras.

Yet around me, the world looked like it kept spinning. If people were trying to hide their grief, they were doing it well. The metro kept running. People went to work. Shops opened and closed. I was stuck. Then it got worse: I started hearing people talk about it, in ways that made me question my own sanity. Talk about how he was driving without a license. How sometimes the police needs to hurt people who don’t cooperate. I kept squinting with my eyes, with my ears, with my whole brain trying to understand how we had collectively become okay with someone killing a child in the street.

I told my friends. They felt similarly confused, powerless and lonely. We were scared because the people around us seemed to think this was normal. So we decided to take action. We wanted to honour him, but more than anything, I think we really just needed to not be alone with our grief.

We decided to meet in the town square and to put up a memorial. We painted his name, Nahel, in thick, black letters on sheets of A4 paper, we bought candles at the DIY store, and some flowers. Then the four of us met up. We plastered the letters on the wall and created a small shrine, then we took turns sharing how we felt.

That's when something interesting happened: people started joining us in our circle. Strangers and passersby who had also been heartbroken and alone with their grief started to join in and share how they were feeling. A middle-aged woman instantly broke into tears, tears that seemed like they had just been waiting for the right moment to overflow. She said she had a son, a teenage son about the age of Nahel, who also looked North African, and how it could so easily have been him. We all cried her tears with her. Then another person stopped, and another, and here we were, eight people standing in a public place, talking about our feelings, talking about the news, talking about how the news made us feel, and crying and grieving and holding it all together. Something shifted in my body that day.

We breathed. We awkwardly hugged each other and smiled at the strangers standing next to us. And, once the wave of sadness had washed over us, once our pre-frontal cortexes came back online, we started talking politics. How we wanted to make sure we wouldn’t have to stand here ever again. For the first time in a long time, being a news consumer and reacting to the news made me feel connected and empowered instead of lonely and desperate.

I said I was going to tell you about the history of journalism. But when I read about the history of journalism, too often I read disembodied takes, distant descriptions of information carved on a slab of white stone. What I want to imagine, though, looks more like this: a person stepping up onto a soapbox, telling their community about the latest changes they’ve gathered. In this picture, the community talks back: it can tell the journalist when their facts are wrong, it can hold them accountable. And perhaps most crucially, when the newsbearer brings news of someone’s death, people look at each other, and they cry together. I suspect that might be how we stay human through it all.

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​+ one good story: Today's good story is one that will make possible so many more good, independent stories. It’s hard being an independent publisher in 2025. Media is shrinking. Journalists are leaving the field. Billionaires are blocking stories. The only funding we can rely is on what readers like you contribute. That’s what keeps us editorially independent and financially independent. And that’s important in a world where most messages we’re getting online are coming from corporate interests or powerful political forces. All of this led us to team up with our fellow indie publishers for the Back Indie Media Drive, running all through September. We know you’re an indie media supporter because you’re here. Become a paid supporter of good story, then skim through all of the publishers in the Indie Media Drive and choose one other to support, too. It’s (hopefully) a small impact on your wallet and it’s a massive help towards keeping actually independent media alive.

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+ one question for you: In your wildest dreams, what does journalism look like? Someone standing on a soapbox? A sharing circle? Flying messages in the sky? What does it feel like? What does it taste like?

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Who am I?

Hi! I’m Anna Pujol-Mazzini – after working as an international correspondent for ten years, I founded good story to investigate the current state of our journalistic and non-fiction practices and how we can put them in service of the revolution. When I’m not writing this newsletter, I help teams around the world produce good stories through fact-checking, moderating panels and events and 1-1 consultations on trauma-informed reporting. If you're working on something and want to collaborate – reply to this email and say hi! I'd love to hear what you're building. Or book a 15-minute call and tell me all about your project.